Louis Theroux, Unwitting Rap Star
Four or five times a week, a friend will contact Louis Theroux and tell him, “My daughter keeps going around the house singing your rap,” or, “My wife was exercising to your rap in her Pilates class.” Passing by a school, Mr. Theroux hears a child call out: “My money don’t jiggle jiggle.”
His agent has been fielding dozens of requests for appearances. Mr. Theroux, a 52-year-old British American documentary filmmaker, has turned them all down, not least because, as he put it, “I am not trying to make it as a rapper.”
But in a way, he already has: Mr. Theroux is the man behind “Jiggle Jiggle,” a sensation on TikTok and YouTube, where it has been streamed hundreds of millions of times. He delivers the rap in an understated voice that bears traces of his Oxford education, giving a lilt to the lines: “My money don’t jiggle jiggle, it folds/I’d like to see you wiggle, wiggle, for sure.”
For Mr. Theroux, it has been a little unsettling. He said, “It’s a bittersweet thing to experience a breakthrough moment of virality through something that, on the face of it, seems so disposable and so out of keeping with what it is that I actually do in my work.”
In 2000, he was hosting “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends,” a BBC Two series in which he delved into various subcultures. For an episode in the third season, he traveled to the American South, where he met a number of rappers. He decided to do a rap himself, but he had only a few meager lines: “Jiggle Jiggle/I love it when you wiggle/It makes me want to dribble/Fancy a fiddle?”
He enlisted Reese & Bigalow, a rap duo in Mississippi, to help him. Bigalow cleaned up the opening lines and linked the word “jiggle” with the word “jingle” to suggest the sound of coins. Reese asked him what kind of car he drove. His reply — Fiat Tipo — led to the lines, “Riding in my Fiat/ You really have to see it/Six-feet-two in a compact/No slack but luckily the seats go back.”
“Reese & Bigalow infused the rap with a genuine quality,” Mr. Theroux said.
BBC viewers witnessed his rap debut when the episode aired in 2000. That might have been the end of “Jiggle Jiggle” — but “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends” got new life in 2016, when it started streaming on Netflix UK. The rap episode became a favorite.
This February, Mr. Theroux was on the web talk show “Chicken Shop Date,” hosted by the London comedian Amelia Dimoldenberg, who asked about the rap, prompting him to launch into his rhymes.
Luke Conibear and Isaac McKelvey, a pair of DJ-producers in Manchester, England, known as Duke & Jones, set the audio to a track with an easygoing beat. They uploaded it to YouTube, where it has over 12 million views.
But “Jiggle Jiggle” became a phenomenon thanks largely to Jess Qualter and Brooke Blewitt, 21-yearold graduates of Laine Theater Arts in Surrey, England. In April, they heard the song and choreographed moves for the “Jiggle Jiggle” dance. A video of them performing it took off on TikTok.
In May, Shakira performed the “Jiggle Jiggle” dance on NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”
The whole episode has been strange for Mr. Theroux’s 14-year-old son. “‘Why is my dad, the most cringe guy in the universe, everywhere on TikTok?’” Mr. Theroux said, giving voice to his son’s reaction.